Air Force veteran Brett Hays stands with the CGS that was built in a three-year span. It’s still a work in
progress, at a cost of approximately $3,000 in components and material.

Climb inside the Cockpit Ground Station
FPV flying was still a lonely outpost on the far fringes of the world of model aviation when the Roswell
Flight Test Crew got its start. As did
many early pioneers, we struggled to
even describe the experience. The most
common phrase you would hear was,
“It’s like being in the cockpit.”
Oregon modeler Brett Hays has taken
that concept to a whole new level with
a creation he calls the Cockpit Ground
Station, or CGS for short. It’s a project
he’s been working on for more than
three years, born of a childhood dream
and a lifelong passion for aviation.

As the name suggests, it is a fully
enclosed, ground-based aircraft cockpit
with conventional, manned-aircraft
controls: a joystick for pitch and roll,
foot pedals for yaw, and a throttle lever.
Oh, and a 42-inch flat-screen television
for an immersive FPV experience and
working flight instruments. In short, it’s
not like being in the cockpit—you are in
the cockpit, literally.

Up, Up, and Away!

Brett knows his way around a cockpit,
both in front of and behind the panels.

A U.S. Air Force veteran, he joined the
service in 1988. He was initially assigned
to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware,
where he worked as maintenance crew
chief on a C-5A Galaxy cargo aircraft,
and was with the first maintenance
teams on the ground for Operation
Desert Storm.

In 1996, he earned his wings and
became a flight engineer at Travis Air
Force Base in California. He logged more
than 3,000 hours in the Galaxy and
circumnavigated the Earth twice—once
in each direction.

“I considered myself to be one of the
luckiest guys in the world,” he said. “It
was a perfect job for me because I love
flying and troubleshooting problems,
and believe me, the C- 5 had its share of
problems. It was intense being part of
a crew that made this 769,000-pound
airplane seemingly float in midair.”
Upon Brett’s retirement, model
aviation seemed like a natural way to
pursue his love of flying, but when
FPV technology emerged, it reignited
a notion that had been dormant in his
mind for decades.

He recalled, “When I was a kid and
just learning to fly model airplanes, like
every person in the world who flies a
model airplane, I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it
be great to have real airplane controls?’
Well, back in the ’80s, FPV wasn’t
anything that anybody was even
thinking about. The technology just
didn’t exist.

“A few years ago, the time, money, and
opportunity all caught up with me, so I
put that childhood dream together. It’s
a dream I share with every modeler out
there.”
Adapting full-scale aircraft controls
to flying a model aircraft has entailed
challenges on several levels. Technical,
for certain, but also calibrating the pilot’s
inputs to the scale of the model.

“It’s not like flying a real airplane, and
it’s not like flying a model airplane,” he
explained. “You have to train these great
big muscles to make these tiny control
inputs. The rudder for me was the
hardest part. The first time I flew a quad,
I was yawing all over the place. I’d do a
complete 360° turn, then overcorrect
and do it again [in] the other direction.”

Making It Work

The CGS, which is mounted on
a small trailer that Brett pulls along
behind his RV, runs off of deep-cycle,

12-volt batteries that provide enough
power for approximately three hours
of flying. It can be recharged using wall
current with an extension cord that is
built into the unit. The RC transmitter,
FPV video receiver, and other electronics
are directly powered by the 12-volt
system. The flat-screen television draws
its power from an inverter that boosts it
to 120 volts.